The action leaps from New York to Paris to Istanbul, but never leaves the rarefied Hartley world where everyone speaks in clipped, staccato bursts of dialogue that sound like a New York indie take on David Mamet, and characters have a tendency to pose and look offscreen as they proclaim their lines in pensive bursts.

Parker Posey is Fay Grim, a single mom left behind when Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) fled the country to escape a murder charge. Seven years later, the CIA (led by Jeff Goldblum) comes searching for Henry's magnum opus.

It turns out the enigmatic garbage man with a foul mouth is a former government agent and the self-indulgent notebook scribblings he called "The Confessions" is actually an elaborate code hiding secrets that could take down governments. Or maybe its just more subterfuge.

Regardless, Fay flies to Paris to pick up two recovered volumes and becomes an indie-chic Audrey Hepburn (dressed in a black leather ensemble out of an adult remake of "The Matrix") in an intellectual shell -game version of "Charade," with more double agents in the Cary Grant role than she can keep straight.

Too hip to play it straight and too cool to resort to an actual story, Hartley turns the whole rambling spy game into a puzzle box where every certainty is thrown into doubt, every character has a hidden motive, and every clue is contradicted. Which leaves Parker in Hartley-land, verbally sparring her way through literary games while trying to make sense of a tangled plot that finally knots itself to an end.